554 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



itant Variations. If the causes which act upon the state of any society 

 produced effects differing from one another in kind; if wealth depended 

 upon one cause, peace upon another, a third made a people virtuous, a 

 fourth intelligent ; we might, though unable to sever the causes from 

 one another, refer to each of them that property of the effect which 

 waxed as it waxed, and which waned as it waned. But every attribute 

 of the social body is influenced by innvimerable causes; and such is the 

 mutual action of the coexisting elements of society, that whatever 

 affects any one of the more important of them, will by that alone, if it 

 does not affect the others directly, affect them indirectly. The effects, 

 therefore, of different agents not being different in quality, while the 

 quantity of each is the mixed result of all the agents, the variations of 

 the aggregate cannot bear any uniform proportion to those of any one 

 of its component parts. 



§ 5. There remains the Method of Residues ; which appears, on the 

 first view, less foreign to this kind of inquiry than the three other meth- 

 ods, because it only requires that we should accurately note the circum- 

 stances of some one country, or state of society. Making allowance, 

 thereupon, for the effect of all causes whose tendencies are known, the 

 residue which those causes are inadequate to explain may plausibly be 

 imputed to the remainder of the circumstances which are known to 

 have existed in the case. Something similar to this is the method 

 which Coleridge* describes himself as having followed in his political 

 essays in the Morning Post. " On every great occurrence I endeav- 

 ored to discover in past history the event that most nearly resembled 

 it. I procured, wherever it was possible, the contemporary historians, 

 memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of 

 diflerence from those of likeness, as the balance favored the former or 

 the latter, I conjectured that the result would be the same or different. 

 As for instance in the series of essays entitled ' A comparison of France 

 under Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars,' and in those which 

 followed, ' on the probable final restoration of the Bourbons.' The 

 same plan I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish Revolution, 

 and with the same success, taking the war of the United Provinces 

 with Philip II. as the groundwork of the comparison." In this inquiry 

 Coleridge no doubt employed the Method of Resi^lues ; for, in " sub- 

 tracting the points of diflerence from those of likeness," he doubtless 

 weighed, and did not content himself with numbering them : he doubt- 

 less took those points of agreement only, which might be known from 

 their own nature to be capable of influencing the effect, and, allowing 

 for that influence, concluded that the remainder of the result would be 

 referable to the points of difference. 



Whatever may be the efficacy of this method, it is, as we long ago 

 remarked, not a method of pure observation and experiment ; it con- 

 cludes, not from a comparison of instances, but fi'om the comparison 

 of an instance with the result of a previous deduction. Applied to so- 

 cial phenomena, it presupposes that the causes from which part of the 

 effect proceeded are already known ; and as we have shown that these 

 cannot have been known by specific experience, they must have been 

 learned by deduction fi:om the principles of human nature ; experience 



* Biographia Liieraria, i., 214. 



